Last week I made the mistake of checking 538/RCP in advance of the upcoming elections. For the last couple of days I realized I was fearful of a repeat of 2018, with results differing from predictions, and the Repubs maintaining or even increasing their current advantages in both houses.
On too many occasions, Dems have failed to turn out when needed, and to fumble any advantage. And the cynical portion of me just wonders if so many Repub positions I consider anathema actually represent a majority of Americans’ values.
I’m not putting any expectations on the midterms. (I know how I would like them to turn out.) After so many Americans voted to put Donald Friggen Trump in the White House I am done predicting/expecting. I’ll cast my vote, then see how the rest of 'em did it.
It wouldn’t surprise me. The left is badly out of touch with how pissed off a huge percentage of the populace is with progressive causes. Open borders, gun confiscation, genderqueer empowerment and berating people for being insufficiently woke is not a platform that will endear the Democrats to John and Jane Smith. At best the Dems might get a bare majority in the House, and they may well do worse.
[ul]
[li]Trump is only in the Oval Office because of massive Russian interference that garnered 73,000 more votes in key states that threw him the Electoral College. It wasn’t a “mandate” election. He cheated and he “won.”[/li][li]Throw the poll models out the window. Special elections since Trump’s election have consistently shown increased turnout of between 8-12% that could not be accounted for by polling. Why? Because these are new voters, people who weren’t paying attention before but they are now. You can’t count them for polling purposes because they are an unknown quantity. [/li]
A good example would be Democrat Ralph Northam’s gubernatorial race in Virginia, against perennial favorite Republican Ed Gillespie. That race was projected by the polls to be essentially tied. When the dust settled, Northam won by 9 points. This has been a typical result in special elections for the past 2 years.
[li]Since Trump’s election, many Republicans have peeled off to now identify as independents. Independents are breaking for Democratic candidates by a wide margin.[/li][li]Republicans show increasing desperation. They’re actually lying outright about policy positions, such as that they intend to protect preexisting conditions in healthcare. They’re doing this because they know they’re losing.[/li][li]Media coverage is controlled by eyeballs, and you don’t get eyeballs with pundits proclaiming that you can stick a fork in Republicans, they’re done. It has to be a horse race. You won’t hear anything else until election day.[/li][li]Have you seen the early voting turnout graphs for 2018? Just… wow. We’re seeing turnout that triples and in some cases even quadruples turnout in previous mid-term elections. In general, this favors Democratic candidates.[/ul][/li]
There are still structural disadvantages built in to the election system that are unfavorable to Democrats, and we’ll have to see if Democratic turnout can overcome them. But I choose to be cautiously optimistic for the reasons I listed.
What I am far more worried about is if Republicans will accept the election results after this election, especially in close Senate races.
I’m worried that the Democrats will accept the results, even if they seem completely out of line with polling done in the days and weeks ahead of the election.
If the results were tampered with and fraudulent, I have no confidence that the Democratic Party will stand up and demand an accounting. IMO they’d stare at blatant vote tampering and say “well, it’s not worth upsetting the whole apple cart” and they’ll just roll over like they did in 2000.
And that’s the Democrats real problem: they are perceived as weak because of previous inaction. FIGHT, Democrats! Fight for what you think is right!
Except arguably the first: I think many on the actual left well know how unpopular their causes are: so unpopular that the Democratic leadership doesn’t even embrace them! The list in your second sentence would be a platform that would alienate them from John and Jane Smith - if it were actually their platform!
I should know, I feel I have less in common with those people, some even on this message board, who espouse what you are talking about, than the actual Democratic candidates who steer well clear of this.
Sadly, many republican voters think this is the actual Democratic platform, but changing their actual positions won’t help because they will continue to be told lies about what the Democrats stand for, and most of them want to believe the lies as a reason to continue to vote for who they’ve already decided to vote for.
Yes. Gerrymandering is a huge problem. But Dems reduced the margin of House of Delegates seats held by Republicans to just 2, picking up 15 of the 17 seats they needed to flip the majority. Do you think Republicans forecast that as a possibility?
That may not be the official Democratic platform, but people worry the described above is the Democrat’s crazy cousin who may end up becoming a house guest. Certainly the Democrats are not going to expel anyone from the party for advocating such views.
The only plausible scenario in which that could become true is if the magats believe it so heartily that the democrats don’t have anything to lose by embracing it, while at the same time the number of people who vaguely believe what the poster is accusing them of rises from somewhere south of 10% of Americans to much higher than that (leaving aside such obvious hyperbole as “open borders”, which I took to read as any position slightly to the left of Saint Ronnie who believed in amnesty for illegal immigrants.)
Well, with the exception of "genderqueer empowerment ", none of those are any part of the Democratic Platform. And not really "genderqueer empowerment " but equal rights for all, regardless.
